La Conner likes to think it's an "art town" but it's really a dreadful enclave of rich hippies and the kind of sub-Chihuly monstrosities they like to plop in the foyers of their McMansions. Like Magic Dolphin Art, only for people with money. The place gives me the willies. So, yeah, he should move.

Fnarf, you are, as usual, clueless. La Conner is a tourist town of 600 people, and about 3 of them are "rich hippies". There are a sizeable community of retired farmers, some Latinos, some artists, fishermen, poets, cooks, and Indians- across the slough are hundreds of Native americans, and they are NOT rich.

Anyway, MONA serves the entire area, not just the tiny town of La Conner- frequent visitors come from the San Juan Islands, north to Bellingham, upriver towards Concrete, and the whole Skagit Valley.

If a curator or museum director is unwilling to move to the vicinity of their musuem, I would say THAT is the problem- should every single thing in Washington State move to convenient commute distance to Seattle? Isnt that what the failed experiment of Bellevue is?

The fact is, a regional museum is a perfectly good thing. It does different things than a big city museum does, and that is as it should be. But a regional museum, to be run properly, needs people who live in the region.

For instance, shouldnt the Seattle Art Musuem just move to NYC or LA, as the revolving door of curators and directors there seem to prefer living in those cities, so it would be SO much more convenient for them if the Museum was there too, n'est ce pas?

The real fault, of course, lies with the board of the Museum, who wouldnt insist that residency was a condition of hiring.

@3, I am aware of the reservation across the river. I didn't see any of those people on the streets of La Conner, at least not the street where all the "art" galleries are. And everything on that street gave me the mega-creeps. Call 'em tourists if you want to; but the "art" that's available there costs thousands, and is uniformly horrible and, yes, hippiefied. Personally, I blame Tom Robbins.

I suspect the board doesn't make residency a condition of hiring because that would reduce the pool of applicants to the point of idiocy. I assume they want someone with a little more savvy than your average Thomas Kinkade boutique owner or ice cream server.

In what way is Bellevue a failed experiment? It's arguably the healthiest city in the region. I think they even have a net in-migration of commuters nowadays, i.e., the population is higher from 9-5 than outside that time, with all the people who live in the bedroom community of Seattle but work in Bellevue. And there's been more construction cranes in Bellevue than in Seattle for quite some time now. Of course those aren't the highly sophisticated tourists who waddle down the streets of La Conner looking at the $8,000 giant glass frogs.

Hell, move to Bellingham if you're trying to draw from the region. La Conner is nowhere.

No, the Museum of Northwest Art is not far, far away from Seattle - all of 1.5 hours driving, if that.

I've visited the Seattle museum once or twice. I've visited the Museum of Northwest Art four or five times. I live in San Francisco. It's a absolutely wonderful museum and it's right where it should be in my opinion.